Libertarians Against Immigration

The Syrian refugee crisis has brought immigration into popular discussion again, and libertarians are along for the ride. The immigration policies of the U.S. government are a topic upon which many libertarians disagree. Some, like the author, favor open borders, while other libertarians contend that open borders represent an act of aggression by the State because in many cases, the State actually encourages immigration that would not otherwise occur. The libertarians who oppose open borders have heavy firepower on their side, such as Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Stephen Kinsella, and Lew Rockwell. If I’m going to make a case for open borders, it better be a good one. I have immense respect for all of them, as they have all influenced my journey in libertarian thought.

Where I think many libertarians go astray is in failing to recognize who the true aggressors are in immigration (it’s not the immigrants), whether current immigration trends would occur in a stateless society, and in misapplication of property rights. I will attempt to rebut these objections to the best of my ability.

They’re Draining Our Resources

Many libertarians and conservatives alike object to free movement of people on the grounds that immigrants do not pay taxes, or at least they are taxed less heavily than citizens, yet they draw upon resources purchased with that tax money. In making this argument, they misidentify the true drain on resources, the State itself.

I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these people.

-Murray Rothbard, Nations By Consent: Decomposing The Nation-State

Subsidized immigration is clearly an aggression by the State. It is a wealth transfer from the productive class to welfare recipients, with the government bureaucracy acting as the middle man. But the aggressor here is the State, not the immigrant. If the State wishes to destroy an indigenous culture, then that is a pernicious motivation for the aggression, but this is not the fault of the immigrants themselves. Governments incentivize all kinds of behavior, and any time they do so, there are consequences. Domestic welfare is just as destructive to the culture of the citizens of a country as welfare given to immigrants from another country. The motivations behind a particular government policy, pernicious as they may be, do not justify restricting the movement of people. Libertarians should take issue with the fact that some people have been extorted, and not be quite as concerned with who the extorted money was given to (unless it’s given to funding wars, in which their ire should be about equal with the theft and the recipient thereof).

Open Borders Violate Property Rights– Or Do They?

In a speech entitled “Open Borders are an Assault on Private Property,” Lew Rockwell has this to say:

But neither can we say that public property is unowned. Property in the possession of a thief is not unowned, even if at the moment it does not happen to be held by the rightful owner. The same goes for so-called public property. It was purchased and developed by means of money seized from the taxpayers. They are the true owners.

That is true. However, to object to open borders on these grounds is erroneous, because it makes the theft about the recipients of the thief’s stolen goods. No one would direct their ire toward a pawn shop if a thief hawked stolen goods there (unless the pawn shop owner knew the goods were stolen), nor would they castigate a clothing shop if the thief spent the money he received there. Rockwell is right that public property is not unowned. It is rightfully owned by those from whom it was stolen. But this is not an argument for restricting certain people’s’ access to that property. This argument makes about as much sense as advocating a reduction in the number of Ford automobiles that should be allowed to cross a public roadway on the basis that Fords are less beneficial to the roads than Dodges. The people who had their money and property stolen are the owners of the money and/or property that was stolen from them. They are not partial owners of everything the government spent the money on.

Obviously, in a pure open borders system, the Western welfare states would simply be overrun by foreigners seeking tax dollars. As libertarians, we should of course celebrate the demise of the welfare state. But to expect a sudden devotion to laissez-faire to be the likely outcome of a collapse in the welfare state is to indulge in naïveté of an especially preposterous kind.

I don’t know many libertarians that are optimistic about the possibility of voluntary solutions gaining popularity in the event of the collapse of the welfare state, at least not right now. But the held beliefs of immigrants are again not a justification for restricting their freedom of movement. If lack of faith in laissez-faire were grounds for restricting people’s’ movement from one area to another, Californians should not be allowed to move to Idaho, and Boiseans should be restricted from moving to Sandpoint. I certainly wouldn’t expect there to be positive results, at least initially, from a mass subsidized influx of immigrants into the U.S. But I do know that to deny the entry of immigrants into areas not owned by property owners with legitimate claims is an act of aggression.

These migrations, in short, are not market outcomes. They would not occur on a free market. What we are witnessing are examples of subsidized movement. Libertarians defending these mass migrations as if they were market phenomena are only helping to discredit and undermine the true free market.

While it is true that the U.S. government’s immigration and economic policies subsidize and encourage immigration that is not beneficial to the existing U.S. population, the U.S. government also subsidizes and encourages the growing of corn. Some of this corn would not be grown in a free market scenario, and indeed, this overproduction of corn is harmful to the American economy. But this is not a reason for us to deride corn farmers, or to reduce corn production by fiat. Certainly the government’s interference with markets has resulted in all kinds of deleterious side effects, and production into avenues that would not have occurred in a free market. This is not a sufficient argument for the curtailment of those activities. Any restriction of those activities will be based on arbitrary numbers, and the relative political pressure that can be mustered by forces for and against immigration. It will not be based on the preferences of property owners any more than it is now.

There are some American farmers who would likely desire more immigrants on their property than there are currently, and some property owners that would prefer fewer. We cannot know what every property owner would prefer, and any government restriction or subsidy with regards to immigration will necessarily violate the right of those property owners to determine for themselves how many immigrants to accept.

In fact, there exists a fundamental difference between unowned goods and public property. The latter is de facto owned by the taxpaying members of the domestic public. They have financed this property; hence, they, in accordance with the amount of taxes paid by individual members, must be regarded as its legitimate owners. Neither the bum, who has presumably paid no taxes, nor any foreigner, who has most definitely not paid any domestic taxes, can thus be assumed to have any rights regarding public property whatsoever.

-Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed

Taxpayers are not de facto owners of public property. If you are unsure about this fact, then I invite you, as Rothbard wrote in For A New Liberty, to try building a house on federal lands and see how that works out. Taxpayers are victims of extortion. The things purchased with the funds stolen from them are not theirs, in whole or in part. To say that taxpayers are part owners of the things governments purchase with their stolen funds would be to say they have legitimate property claims to those things, including property that the government has purchased under eminent domain, which was itself illegitimately acquired. It would be like saying that the victims of a mugging are owners of the food and clothing the thief purchases with the stolen funds. Furthermore, if taxpayers are understood to own public property, then it follows that the bureaucrats who administer it should be considered their employees. Thus, if government officials decide to open the borders, then they are acting on behalf of the taxpayers themselves, and no violation of their property rights has occurred! And if taxpayers truly did “own” public property, then to desocialize that property from the government would be theft, as they would all have a legitimate claim to that property.

Hoppe is also affirming a disjunct by assuming that public property and unowned property are always different things. Some public property should rightfully be considered to be unowned. Some should be considered stolen, and the rightful property of those from whom it was stolen. For example, areas of wilderness that are controlled by state and federal governments should rightfully be considered unowned, rather than the property of the State. A street that was built on the property of those forced to accept payment through eminent domain is stolen, and should be returned to those owners. If no owner of a previously stolen property, or their heir, can be found, the property is rightfully unowned and should be available to be homesteaded, even if that property happens to be the present-day location of the Pentagon.

What I am getting at is that the state does own many resources, even if (as I and other anarcho-libertarians believe) the state has no natural or moral right to own these things. Nonetheless the state does own some resources—roads, ports, buildings and facilities, military bases, etc. We can allow that a road, for example, is actually, or legally, owned by the state, while also recognizing that the “real” owners are the taxpayers or previous expropriated owners of the land who are entitled to it.

Kinsella definitely understands that the State cannot be rightly said to own anything. However, he uses this de facto “ownership” to argue that the State has merely become a steward of the property in question, albeit without the consent of the owners of the property. It may seem punctilious, but where Kinsella says “own,” he really should have said “controls.” The rightful owner of a property upon which a military base sits cannot show up and attempt to evict the current occupants because he would be arrested. This amounts to the State holding control over the area, but it does not mean the State rightfully owns the property. A thief does not own the things he steals. He physically controls them, but he has no rightful claim over them. As such, every stolen thing he controls is rightfully the property of the person from whom he stole it.

The point here is the state does (legally) own resources which are “really” owned by others. As libertarians, we can view this situation as the state holding property on behalf of the real owners, as a sort of uninvited caretaker.

The idea of the State as caretaker is misguided. This idea feeds the myth of the State as a service provider, when it is not any such thing. It may provide certain services, and indeed force the use of those services upon those under its control, but it is not doing so for the benefit of its oppressed class, but rather to give cover to its true nature as a parasite upon them. It is not a caretaker, it is a thief and a murderer.

The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the “private sector” and often winning in this competition of resources.

-Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State

Statelessness First, Freedom Later?

A totally privatized country would be as “closed” as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de facto in the U.S. really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors.

-Murray Rothbard, Nations By Consent: Decomposing The Nation-State

It is true that if the U.S. government were to open its borders tomorrow, it would be a free-for-all. Some proprietors, such as those who desire cheap labor, would benefit. Taxpayers who foot the bill for the welfare state would have their utility reduced. This would certainly, as Rothbard says, not reflect the wishes of the proprietors. But the current immigration policies do not reflect those wishes either. Current U.S. immigration policy deprives those who wish to hire more immigrants than they do currently the ability to do so. It denies immigrants who wish to work for those employers the ability to do so. It denies a safe haven to those immigrants who are fleeing brutal dictators and U.S. bombs. It certainly does not reflect their wishes.

Current U.S. immigration policy, taxation, welfare programs, agricultural quotas, military campaigns, and the War on Drugs all represent aggressions that affect immigration. They are aggressions that must be rejected, root and branch. Aggression is aggression, and the rejection of one aggression is not contingent upon the successful abolition of aggression of another form. The government has no rightful claim to any property, and therefore any action it takes to control such property has no legitimacy. All State intervention into markets has onerous side effects, and the worsening of those side effects due to a reduction in the aggressions it commits are not a sufficient argument to delay the cessation of those aggressions. It is, however, a great argument for further reducing the interventions which cause such side effects.

Rockwell, Llewellyn H. “Open Borders Are An Assault On Private Property” Speech to the Mises Circle, November 7, 2015. https://mises.org/library/open-borders-are-assault-private-property

7 comments

I really liked this. In particular the comparison of immigration policy and the welfare state to farm subsidies which distort the market for corn: subsidies don’t make the subsidized bad in itself. Great point.

And I totally agree with your conclusion: two wrongs don’t make a right. The “wrong” of welfare statism is not made right by restrictions on immigration.

Cleverly argued but ultimately unconvincing. The author can scarcely conceal the unavoidable conclusion that, however bad our current welfare state is, it would be unimaginably worse when combined with open borders. We would witness wholesale social collapse. Two wrongs don’t make a right, you say. Well then, in that case, redistribution of wealth from some citizens to others does not justify extending that redistribution to foreigners.

I agree. Inviting tens of thousands of third world refugees to come here, providing them with trans oceanic transportation at taxpayer expense, then using our tax dollars to subsidize their lifestyles when they arrive, is impossible for me to justify within any libertarian system. Even under a minimal night watchman state, one of the few tasks assigned to the state would be to secure the national borders.

It seems a major false dichotomy to me for one to assume that we either forcibly and unjustly prevent people from moving across arbitrary lines as they try to save themselves or “[provide] them with trans oceanic transportation at taxpayer expense, then [use] our tax dollars to subsidize their lifestyles when they arrive”.

As the article points out: “Subsidized immigration is clearly an aggression by the State. It is a wealth transfer from the productive class to welfare recipients, with the government bureaucracy acting as the middle man. But the aggressor here is the State, not the immigrant.”

Unsubsidized free immigration is not an aggression at all, however, and should not be forcibly and unjustly restricted.

Yes it would be worse. That’s the nature of government interventions into markets. They have consequences. I have not attempted to justify redistribution, something I oppose root and branch. But if allowing people to cross borders has disastrous effects on government programs, you should blame the government programs.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right, you say. Well then, in that case, redistribution of wealth from some citizens to others does not justify extending that redistribution to foreigners.”
You are correct. That doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate to use any available means to prevent that from occurring. If you follow that line of argument to its extreme that means it would be acceptable to wipe a country off the map because they except foreign aid.

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